Dan Aykroyd: The Playboy Interview, Part Two

Playboy What do you think of the current SNL?
Aykroyd I'm a big, big fan. I watch whenever I don't fall asleep.

Playboy Does it amaze you that the show is still going?
Aykroyd Definitely. It was touch and go there for a while because they thought it wasn't going to succeed after everybody left.

Playboy You didn't go back to guest on the show for years. What took so long?
Aykroyd The fact of the matter is it was emotionally trying for me to go back to 8H.

Playboy: 8H?
Aykroyd: Yeah, 8H, the studio at NBC where we made Saturday Night. I had big memories of Johm. I remember him being wheeled down the halls when he twisted his knee after doing the twist offstage and then whirling out, taking a bow and heading right into the orchestra pit. Things like that. I still see him in the halls there. I go through such emotion. I guess I was afraid I'd go up there and get maudlin.
Playboy: When did you first work together?
Aykroyd: I came down on my bike from Toronto to Manhattan and did a guest spot on the National Lampoon Radio record that he was working on. I was a drummer on a Helen Reddy parody. We started to work together in earnest on Saturday Night Live.

Playboy: How would you characterize your relationship?
Aykroyd: We just immediately clicked and became fast friends. We brought each other different sensibilities. He introduced me to the Allman Brothers and Bad Company and heavy metal adn I introduced him to old blues. He took me under his wing. He had the capacity to sweep you along into his rhythm. With John you just kind of jumped onto the inner tube and took a ride.
John and his wife, Judy, let me stay in their apartment. I slept at the foot of their bed fro almost a year, because I was commmuting from Canada and wasn't sure whether I was going to move to New York. They were sort of like my aunt and uncle.

Playboy: Can you describe what each of you brought to the collaboration?
Aykroyd: It's one of those mystery things of instant chemistry. The two of us together had a good look. Both of us would play straight and both of us would play support. I don't know. It ws just one of those things.

Playboy: Somebody called you and John the Lennon and McCartney of comedy.
Aykroyd: For a while I guess we were. Elaine May and Mike Nichols and Art Carney and Jackie Gleason--there are a lot of great teams around. We had our moment.

Playboy: Did you have a favorite moment together?
Aykroyd: On the show doing the Nixon and Kissinger thing. I think Richard and Henry bonded us.

Playboy: What do you remember about hearing the news that he had died?
Aykroyd: Well, you know, it was really over for me very quickly. It was really over for me in the first minute I realized he was gone.

Playboy: Had you tried to intervene when it was clear he was having problems with drugs?
Aykroyd: We all tried to talk to him. It was hard because he refused help from people who loved him. In retrospect, I see that the Betty Ford confrontation technique is about the only way we could have done anything, but if we had used it, I can see him getting mad at all of us and storming out the door and disappearing for days. We would have literally had to handcuff him, and I think that's what we should have done. He made progress the summer before he died. He was completely off the powders. But he got frustrated.

Playboy: By what?
Aykroyd: The business. And there were people around who hand him anything he wanted.

Playboy: Do you blame those people?
Aykroyd: Well, you can be sure that with all those people, it was John who was running their lives, not the other way around. He was having them come and go as he wanted. He was the captain of his own ship. He was at the helm. Or maybe he wasn't, and that's the trouble. He was downstairs in the galley and there was no one at the helm. So I can look back only with great fondness and a little anger. But we had eight good, rich fulfilling years together, creatively and in terms of a friendship.

Playboy: Did you expect something like that to happen?
Aykroyd: He said he was heading for an early grave. He was always alluding to that. But that's no reason why we should have accepted it.

Playboy: It sounds as if you feel somewhat guilty.
Aykroyd: It's very hard when someone doesn't want to change, ir if they want to change and their will is weak. But I regret that I wasn't stronger, and in a way I do feel a little bit of guilt for letting him slip through my fingers. But there were times when I did try adn there were times when I was effective. Times when he did listen to me. I feel good about the occasions when I was able to help and bad about the occasions when I slipped up.

Playboy: Did you hear about his death from Judy?
Aykroyd: No. I told Judy. I got the call from [our manager] Bernie Brillstein. He called me at the office in New York. It was a beautiful March day and absolutely spectacular in New York. The weather was warm and clear and the streets were full of people enjoying the sunshine. I'll never forget that walk from 150 Fifth Avenue to Morton Street to Judy's house, because I was thinking, I can't get in a cab, I've got to keep walking. Richard Pryor described it when he was burned: He just kept running to stay alive. He knew if he stopped he was going to die. I had that same desperation. I knew if I stopped, it was going to get me, so I just had to walk and get there before Judy heard it on the radio. I managed to get there and I told her. "He's dying" is all I said. And that was the most painful part for me.
After John, Gilda died. I guess the only question is, Who's next? Gilda and John are gone, and gone before the close of a millenium, which is kind of frightening, because it didn't have to happen. Her cancer should have been detected much earlier. And John did not have to die from that speedball, because he should have just left L.A. He shouldn't have been hanging around with those people. He should never have gotten to the point where he was fucking with that shit.

Playboy: Did what happen to John affect your views on drugs?
Aykroyd: As I've always said, we're born in this pure vessell and it's our choice what we want to do with it. There are a lot of pleasures out there. Everyone has to decide. I don't crusade against drugs. I have a resistance to that. I suppose I say, Just be moderate, just be careful. Look at the destruction they've caused. John was a shell that washed up on a beach in the tidal wave of a billion-dollar cocaine industry. It's a big. business.

Playboy: Could you have gone down a path similar to John's?
Aykroyd: I ws never into the powders. Maybe the difference was this: In a sense, of the two of us, John seemed to have the harder exterior, a more macho male, harder thing going. In reality, though, deep down, I'm the boulder, he was the softy. I might have been the one who was more accommodating and more open when you'd meet us, but I'm also the one with the controlled edge and the hardness. He was the soft innocent. And my edge and coldness kept me from those pursuits, whereas his softness and innocence made him vulnerable. To hide it, to close that up, he used drugs--as armor.

Playboy: Even though John is dead, we've heard the Blues Brothers are making a comeback. Why?
Aykroyd: Well, after John died, I thought that would be it. But right after, I met this friend, Isaac Tigrett, who had lost two brothers to tragic circumstances, and his grief was so much bigger than mine could ever be. He helped me get over John's death. We became partners in the Hard Rock Cafe enterprise east of the Mississippi. He ran it, built several restaurants, went public, and sold the company for a hundred million English pounds. So I'm out of that, but every time we opened a Hard Rock, the Blues Brothers band came together. The original band. For a while our co-singer was Sam Moore of Sam and Dave. Then the band asked if we would license them the name so they could tour. Judy and I said, "Go for it"; we get a small percentage of the take. I go out and play the harp sometimes. We do Soul Man and Knock on Wood. We rip the house apart.

Playboy: How do you rate your musical abilities?
Aykroyd: I'm a great emcee-front man and I can move onstage. It's funny and exciting to see a man of two hundred-plus pounds moving in such a way that it looks like he knows reasonably well where he's going and he's not going to hurt people.

Playboy: What are your musical tastes these days?
Aykroyd: I listen a lot. My favorites are the Black Crowes, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray and Jimmy Vaughan, Kim Wilson and the Thunderbirds. There's also a new band called Blues Traveler with an amazing new young harmonica player names John Popper.

Playboy: Might there be another Blues Brothers Movie?
Aykroyd: I'm working on a story with John Landis, who directed the original. We're going to try to bring back everyone from the first movie. We have to convince the studio. The walls of universal are still stained from the firist Blues Brothers movie.

Playboy: Stained? Didn't Universal make money on that?
Aykroyd: Not really, because it cost so much. They made their money back, but it was traumatic getting the movie made. It was an enormous production. John was out of control.

Playboy: You've often been criticized for creating movies with runaway budgets. Aykroyd: We are always criticized for costs--for 1941, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers--but that money doesn't go into the pockets of actors and directors, it goes into the pockets of labor.


Playboy: And special effects and wrecked cars...
Aykroyd: The major expense of Blues Brothers was not the seventy police cars we bought from the Chicago Police Department. We paid only $700 each for them. the major expense was labor, so that's good, it gets people working, and why shouldn't the profits of the megacorporations be reinvested in the trades of this industry? If I write a big show and it costs a lot of money, I make no apologies. I'd be a wealthier made today and a better businessman if I sat down and wrote small movies that cost little and brought in lots

Playboy: Will you continue to make sequels--whether based on the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, or Coneheads or others.
Aykroyd: As long as there is something new to do with them and it's enjoyable. It's kond of nice to have a built-in franchises. The one I don't think we'll necessarily further exploit is Ghostbusters. It looks like that's about had its run.

Playboy: Because Ghostbusters II did so poorly?
Aykroyd: Yeah, it opened and Batman opened the next weekend and wiped us out that summer. Although we made a good movie, it just wasn't as commercially successful as everybody thought it would be thought it would be. If I could get that team together, it would be a real dream, because I think there's a great story to be told. But it won't be for a while. By the way, I heard a great ghost story about an old Manhattan hotel, the Sheraton, that is now the Chinese consulate on 42nd Street on the West Side. We were shooting on the fifth floor in the banquet room. I was outside having a smoke and I saw this guy down the hall in an Air Force jacket with master seargeant stripes. I asked him what was up. He told me there was electronic-countermeasures technician who installs ECM packets on F-16s and F-106s and all that. He told me that his father worked in the building and then he mentioned, "We can't keep guards." When I asked what he meant, he said they had gone through five security guards. They would come running downstairs, yelling, "You can keep your job." They finally questioned one, who said, I "I was making my rounds and I saw something come through a wall."
When the man asked what he had seen, he said, "It was a man's head and shoulders. He was wearing red." So this guy and his dad and brother go up there to check it out. They were walking on the fifth floor and they saw something go across the hall: a guy wearing a red chef's hat and holding a knife and fork. They followed him into the kitchen and he disappeared into the mashed-potato mixer.
He said they researched the employee records of the hotel and found that a week after it had closed, the roast beef chef, who had been there for fifteen years or something, went to a bar around a corner and drank himself to death. His presence is still around.

Playboy: Do you believe that story?
Aykroyd: It's a perfect example of a ghost story I can place credence in because it was unsolicited. Now that the Chinese consulate is there, I've wanted to talk to someone in charge aand ask if there have been any experiences with the presence.

Playboy: Have you ever had a personal experience with a presence?
Aykroyd: My wife and I bought Mam Cass' old house in Hollywood. It is where Cream, John Lennon and Harry Nillson used to hang out. Ringo owned it for a while. California Dreamin' was rehearsed there. We have a presence in that house. A psychic came in and told us that some guy apparently died of a drug overdose in the living room. My wife and I told a friend of ours about it and he turned ashen and gasped. He said, "I know about that." It happened just as the psychic said. It was something that had been hushed up.

Playboy: You called a psychic?
Aykroyd: We had to. The maid wouldn't go upstairs. Also, my mother experienced some stuff there and some friends heard the piano playing and then heard footsteps and doors closing. When the psychic said she couldn't deal with it, my wife went to more traditional methods--religion--to try to get rid of it. But we think it's still there because recently the other maid went upstairs and the door slammed. Another time I was alone in the house in bed and I felt the mattress depress behind me like something was getting into bed. You know what my reaction was? I didn't hop up. I wiggled my rump right up next to it. I thought, If you can like me this much, you're going to feel me right next to you.

Playboy: Did you believe in ghosts as a child?
Aykroyd: Of course. They had seances at the old family farm where I grew up. My mother witnessed an apparition. I once saw some lights I couldn't explain. My father was a psychic researcher, so it was really passed down to me.

Playboy: It seems Ghostbusters is your idea of a documentary, not fiction. Are you pulling our leg?
Aykroyd: Definitely not. The other day I read that Harold Ramis, my colleague in Ghostbuster, said he doesn't believe in ghosts!

Playboy: And that surprises you?
Aykroyd: Yes, because he is a very smart person. I'm going to bring him up to Dudley Town, Massachusetts and scare the shit out of him sometime. I'll take him to the most haunted place on earth. He's my man. He's going. I can't believe he offhandedly says he doesn't believe in ghosts when it's a reality of life on this planet. He's going to get spanked for that.

Playboy: Don't you require more proof of ghosts than those vague experiences?
Aykroyd: Sure. I'm a skeptic. If somebody tells me a ghost story, I want proof. I want ot know ifhe or she was smoking or drinking. In eighty percent of the cases I've inquired about, you can put a name to the presence, a human name. You know why they're there.

Playboy: Why are they there?
Aykroyd: They died in an unfulfilling and unsatisfied way and they are lingering here in this world for something that they'll never have. And it's very simple. Very simple.

Playboy: Frankly, Ramis' view isn't much of a surprise to us.
Aykroyd: But Harold's such a brilliant philosopher. He know that the empiracle scientific world is not all there is. Maybe that's all he sees. I just can't believe that he means it. He's such a practical man, I suppose.

Playboy: Did your experiences with ghosts inspire Ghostbusters?
Aykroyd: Sure, and old ghost movies. Bob Hope, the Bowery Boys, the Marx Brothers all did ghost routines. Ghosts were a big part of humor in the Thirties and Forties. Ghostbusters grew out of those as well as my commitment to and ongoing support of the American Society for Psychic Research.

Playboy: Have you ever not believed?
Aykroyd: No. There is just too much literature, too much research being done, too much evidence.

Playboy: You have no doubts?
Aykroyd: None.

Playboy: Are you ever nervous talking about it in public?
Aykroyd: Not really. Because I got all this legitimization from my parents on it. It's a fascinating area of study.

Playboy: Has there ever been an advisor to you--a publicist or manager--who said, "Listen Dddan, this is not the kind of stuff you want to talk about"?
Aykroyd: No, not really. Ghosts are part of the general lexicon. Most people know they exist.

Playboy: What is the closest thing to a real ghostbuster today?
Aykroyd: There are paranormal scientists who work in the field of telepathy and ESP. There are people who have equipment to detect ghosts.

Playboy: What type of equipment?
Aykroyd: Highly sensitive equipment and sound equipment that can detect presences. A guy I know says that he gets seventy-five percent of his referrals come from religious people.

Playboy: Don't priests feel that it's heresy to mess with those forces?
Aykroyd: But a parish family might have a problem with their house. The priest goes over and gives a blessing, spreads around some salt, lights a candle. That doesn't work and ultimately...

Playboy: Who you gonna call?
Aykroyd: Right. The priest refers it to a professional.

Playboy: How about UFOs?
Aykroyd: There is no question about UFOs. There are photos, videos, recordings. The military knows about them.

Playboy: Have you seen UFOs?
Aykroyd: I've had two vivid experiences. One time the lights were green S-shaped cubes, like two S's following each other, like two little sea horses. They were at the top of the stairs in the old farmhouse in Canada. I was with a friend. We both saw them.

Playboy: Were you straight?
Aykroyd: We were probably not straight, which immediately discounts me by my own rules, but I know what I saw. My mother saw an apparition there once; that's what led to the seances we had at our house.
I saw the other UFO on Martha's Vinyard at my hilltop estate 272 feet above the ocean. It was about three in the morning. I went outside to take a leak off the balcony and I saw it coming from the far upper-right-hand corner of my vision: two objects, around 150,000 feet high. They were perfect circles flying in tandem. They did a beautiful zigzag. I screamed at my wife and my friend's girlfriend to come out. They did and the three of us saw these objects do a beautiful zigzag, and pow! Gone across the sky.

Playboy: The problem with all the anecdotal evidence you have is that anecdotal evidence can prove anything. There can be all kinds of explanations for lights in the sky.
Aykroyd: Forget anecdotes. We're talking ghosts, UFOs. There's physical, recorded evidence. This woman in Massachusetts, every time she picks up a camera and takes a picture, ethereall images appear. She shot some super-8 film that was silent and then played it backward andd there were ethereal voices on it. It made my hair stand right up on end when I heard it. UFOs? There's a famous photo that people have proved is not a hoax.

Playboy: What will you tell your daughter when she asks about ghosts?
Aykroyd: I have to be straight with her. She hasn't brought it up, but when she asks me, I'm going to have to say that some places have ghosts and sometimes souls linger after life. The way to treat them is to talk to them sharply and not let them interfere with your existence.

Playboy: How has being a father affected you?
Aykroyd: It has been a surprise just how much love you can feel and how much love you get back.

Playboy: What's it like playing to a three-year-old? Does she have a good sense of humor?
Aykroyd: A great sense of humor. It's all sort of absurd--mentioning words that shouldn't be said. My only complaint is that we waited so long to have her. We waited seven years, so we missed seven yearsss of enjoying her. I encourage people to have kids early. I'm forty now, and when my daughter 's twenty I'll be approaching sixty.

Playboy: Could you have appreciated being a father in the same way ten years ago?
Aykroyd: A few months ago, Warren Beatty said something to me: "God is very merciful because he doesn't let you know what it's like to have children until you have them. And if you knew that feeling before you had children you'd just yearn and want them so bad." That veil you walk through when you have a child is something that anyone could live with at any point in life.

Playboy: It's hard to believe that Warren Beatty has become a source for parenting wisdom.
Aykroyd: I know. But of course he's just flipped out over his little girl.



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